A wide variety of commonly encountered, commercially important products are either produced, provided, transported, or stored on reels or spools. Such products include (but are not inclusive of) wire, cable, optical fiber, rope or cord and other materials that are suitably flexible to be wound onto a spool. Given their economic significance and pervasiveness, minimizing unintentional damage to spooled products during their transport and storage is of critical importance.
This importance of minimizing and/or eliminating unintentional damage to spooled products is difficult to overstate. In particular, certain spooled products—such as the fine wire used in wire-bonding applications—are essential to the reliable, speedy manufacture of high-performance integrated circuits. For those unfamiliar with wire-bonding, it typically involves the attachment of a very fine wire, usually less than 3 mils in diameter, from one connection pad to another thereby completing an electrical connection in an electronic device. If one considers that according to recent literature, 4×1012 wires are bonded every year in the world and most are used in the approximately 40 to 50 BILLION integrated circuits (IC) produced, one can quickly appreciate that high-quality spools of wire-bonding wire is of profound economic importance.
Unfortunately however, spools of wire-bonding wire oftentimes include damaged sections of wire which—when used in a contemporary manufacturing process—breaks or otherwise becomes unusable such that the entire spool must be changed. In a high capacity, high volume IC production line, unintended or unexpected downtime due to damaged spools of wire is quite undesirable and possibly calamitous.
The origin of such damage to spooled materials is readily understood. In particular, a spool is constructed as a cylinder having an edge or rim at each end and an axial hole for a pin or a spindle, on which is wound the flexible material such as wire, cable or fiber. Due to their shape, spools of material may roll and shift during transportation. And since such spools tend to be heavy, if the rolling or shifting results in one spool striking another, then damage to the spooled material may result. More insidious, the damage may not be apparent by inspection.
Attempts to remedy the rolling or shifting spools typically involve securing spools of material to pallets or other platforms. The “palletized” spools are then moved by forklift or other mechanized methods. These methods too, have unfortunately failed to completely protect the spooled materials from becoming damaged. Damage from forklifts or other pallets are commonplace, and as before such damage may go undetected until a spool of material is subsequently used.
Consequently, methods and apparatus that prevent the damage to spooled materials during their transport and storage would represent a significant advance in the art.